


Dance 'Til You're Dead

by Satine89



Series: The Sewage of Youth [2]
Category: Fall Out Boy, Marvel (Comics), Sherlock (TV), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Crack Crossover, Crossover, Fall Out Boy - The Phoenixverse, Mind Games, Multi, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Sexual Violence, Superheroes, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 06:30:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satine89/pseuds/Satine89
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Moriarty is dead, Greger Nordegren is wildly unstable, New York's been attacked by Loki and his space whales, and Patrick Stump has a suitcase. None of these things should intertwine... but they're about to, because Greg can't resist yet another game. (Marked for graphic violence that is not present in early chapters.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dance 'Til You're Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Well, it took a while, but somehow all these ideas finally synthesized into a crazy massive crossover fic. This is part of the 'Sewage of Youth' series, and I do recommend reading the first part of that, "A Notch on a Bedpost", to really understand some of the dynamics at play here with my original character, who was a character I used to roleplay with and am now adapting to this weird, seedy Sherlock universe... which now encompasses parts of Marvel. For some reason. I don't ask my brain why it works the way it works. 
> 
> For those of you wondering, the Fall Out Boy aspects of this are lifted from their most recent series of music videos, namely "The Phoenix", "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark", and "Young Volcanoes". "Phoenix" and "Volcanoes" are fairly NSFW (for gore/violence and nudity), but I figured I'd list them for anyone interested in looking them up.
> 
> I did put a graphic violence tag on this fic, but since there isn't much going on right now with the story, I'm just going to let everyone know right now: the original character, Greg, is a raging misogynist, horribly vicious and violent, and all-around repugnant. In "A Notch on a Bedpost", he mostly speaks about horrible things; horrible things are going to be depicted in this fic. (If you looked up "The Phoenix", you might have an inkling as to why.) I'll put more specific trigger warnings in front of chapters that get particularly graphic.
> 
> I know this was massive, but thank you for reading and here we go!

Jim Moriarty loved fairy tales.

Greger Nordegren didn’t quite understand it, but it didn’t take long for the fair-skinned, dark-haired wastrel to fall in love with fairy tales. Greg knew he was only supposed to be Jim’s “plaything”. Jim had a lot of them – a sensual raven-haired dominatrix who wasn’t as frightening as she liked to believe she was; the sniper with a dour disposition and a steady glare; people hiding in the sewers of London, the suburbs of New Jersey, the glitterati of Los Angeles. It didn’t matter where Greg went. He could be sure that somewhere, Jim was continuing to enact their bloody, dark, fucked-up fairy tale.

Greg was a musician, one with a considerable cache and draw with the public, one with abilities that made him appealing to the world’s only consulting criminal. He’d managed to avoid the attention of the world’s only consulting detective, a certain Sherlock Holmes, solely by operating in the shadows. Sort of. Greg was in London a lot in the year he knew Jim Moriarty, and the press in America did suspect there was a romantic entanglement there. They didn’t suspect that most of Jim and Greg’s evenings out involved Greg eviscerating and murdering people who hadn’t adequately paid Jim, while Jim watched, placidly, with a smile that could crack a mirror painted on his face. Sometimes there was sex. Sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes Greg got the feeling Jim was sleeping with everyone in his inner circle. Sometimes Greg got the feeling he might be the only one.

But it was a fairy tale. Greg had an outlet, and the only thing he owed Jim was gratitude for giving it to him. It wasn’t easy to keep his secrets and fetishes and the fact that he might not be entirely normal from the fawning teenaged girls who threw themselves at him. But Jim was pretty damned good at keeping secrets.

He took most of them to his grave.

[…break…]

_Time: May 2012._

Greg seriously thought he was just too high to function when everything changed.

He’d been too high to function for… uh, about four months? It’d been four fucking months since Jim, in a fit of something that made Greg seethe with jealousy every time he thought about it, shot himself in the head to get one-up on that stupid curly-haired ugly-ass detective bastard. Fucking Sherlock Holmes. Greg couldn’t bring himself to even try to find Jim’s body. Moran insisted that he was free and he should go do whatever he wanted, but Greg understood what the sniper was trying to tell him – stay out of this. This isn’t your place. 

Greg never liked Moran anyways. Moran didn’t believe in the fairy tale.

As with most days, Greg had been dividing his time between writing music and shooting up cocaine, staring through blinds out at sunny California days, not wanting to go outside. He wasn’t eating much, something that his label consistently reminded him (when they bothered to even call). He was working on an album, honestly – he had most of the framework of it down, as well as the lyrics to some songs that people would read too much into. He wrote a song for Taylor Swift, who promptly tried to glom onto him and start dating him. He was really not in the headspace to deal with her and was pretty sure he’d never be in the right headspace to deal with her.

On this day in May, Greg was busy trying to find a vein on his arm, a place that wasn’t already purple and bruised from pinpricks, while the television in his stark, lonely home blared on. CNN truly was the definition of white noise, Greg thought aimlessly, teeth grinding in anticipation of the drug. He used to have it on in the background when Jim got off on one of his… things. The things where he bellowed and screamed and sometimes beat Greg up. Greg missed the chaos of those nights. Maybe he shouldn’t, but he did. He missed it all. The motherfucker _killed himself_. For _no reason at all_. He had everything, the empire, Sherlock would never crack it! He had all those people. 

Jim had _him_. 

Wasn’t that enough?

The fresh needle-prick on Greg’s arm bled slightly as he injected himself, sighing and flopping back onto his bed. His teeth stopped grinding, his hazel eyes staring at a ceiling that rapidly became much more inviting, with each passing second. Maybe he laid there for a few minutes, or a few hours, but one bit of news cut through his reverie enough to make him sit up.

“We have some breaking news for all our viewers – it would appear that New York is under attack from… what? Are you…? …Christ. Aliens are attacking New York.”

[…break…]

Like most people in the greater United States, Greg spent the rest of the day riveted to his television. He had to be hallucinating those space whales… but why would he hallucinate them in a newscast?

About ten minutes after realizing that no, those were actual _things_ , attacking the real New York, and yes, Iron Man was there – Greg knew all about Tony Stark, but had never actually met the man, despite having an oddly large collection of pictures of him on various laptops. (Blame Tumblr.) There were others, too. Superheroes. The whole thing was surreal in a way that Greg couldn’t quite describe. 

Greg had always written off superheroes and supervillains and all that shit. Sure, there was Iron Man, but he was a drunk philanthropist playboy in a metal suit. Greg could admire the ingenuity of it all, but none of these people… were really… supernatural. They were geniuses. They were created by man. Greg didn’t know what the fuck Thor was, but he was the closest thing to…whatever Greg was.

One of the things Jim knew of Greg, when he appeared in Greg’s dressing room nearly two years ago at the Royal Albert Hall, was that he had a strange little quirk, one that allowed him to make people do whatever the hell he wanted. It was a wonderful skill, and all he had to do was talk. His words could swirl into a person’s brain and make them surrender themselves to him, simply, easily, without mess or fuss or muss. Jim wasn’t immune to his powers, but Jim was smarter than your average fifteen-year-old groupie slut, or your silly club boy, or any number of the revenge-minded people trapped in Jim Moriarty’s web.

His web didn’t exist anymore, but Greg still had his powers. And nothing was helping to slake his eternal bloodlust. He’d been living the perfect life when he was under Jim’s thumb. He had no illusions about the whole arrangement – Greg might’ve fallen in love with Jim, but Jim was constantly searching for someone that wouldn’t bore him. And when Greg didn’t bore him, everything was perfect, beautiful. Greg was a grimy murderous princess with a golden tongue, blood coating him and hugging every angle like a prom dress. When Greg bored him, there were others. Others that Greg still wanted to tear apart for daring to touch Jim.

Greg could feel his blood pounding in his ears the more he watched the footage. It was pretty much a terrorist attack at this point. People were probably dying by the truckloads, all because of some weirdo in a shiny helmet. This wasn’t anything like the fairy tale he’d been living in. It didn’t even look real… it was weird. Greg wasn’t sure if it was the cocaine numbing him to the violence on the screen. He was used to violence involving high-pressure spurts of blood, screaming, eroticism. This was just a bunch of dumb show.

And whatever that blue thing on Stark Tower was, all it did was remind Greg of a story Jim told him once. He read about it on the Internet… maybe in November? Was it that long ago? But Jim proceeded to laugh his head off when he read it. See, there were scientists in America who thought that the demolition of a small town in Texas was because of aliens. Jim thought it was hysterical – and then started digging. 

Greg didn’t see Jim again after that. He got a little busy getting arrested for breaking into three highly-secured institutions. Then he was busy stalking Sherlock Holmes. And then he was busy dying for him. It’s a good thing Sherlock jumped off that fucking building, because if he hadn’t, Greg would’ve made his last hours the most painful he’d ever experienced.

[…break…]

A few days later, Greg was tossing out his trash when he was encountered by a neighbor.

That kind of thing happened infrequently – Greg didn’t step outside very much anymore, and most of the people in the area he lived in were fairly well-off. They understood, as they didn’t step out much, either. Greg tried to ignore the person, knowing full well who it was and that he’d be able to figure out really quickly that Greg had been using and would ask probing questions that Greg didn’t want to –

“…Greg, hey, man! I thought you were in London still.”

Might as well drive a spike through his head. Greg dropped his bag of trash into the blue bin before looking up, his long brown hair messily falling into his face. Of course it was Peter Fucking Wentz. At least his kid wasn’t around today; last thing he needed was to fake civility in front of a four-year-old. Even if that four year old had literally the dumbest name in existence.

Greg had known Pete for a few years, just from the fact that the two of them wandered around Los Angeles and had lived in the same cul-de-sac for a while. True, Greg hadn’t spent much of the past year and a half in LA, and Pete kept going back to Chicago, Illinois, for no reason Greg could actually discern – his ex-wife didn’t live there. Far as Greg knew. Greg wasn’t really in a headspace to start figuring out what the fuck Pete Wentz did with his life.

Greg did force a weird sort of awkward smile. “Oh, no, just been working on a new album. Holing myself up, you know?”

Pete returned the weird sort of awkward smile. Clearly he had something on his mind, something that he was going to start blabbering about. Pete was weirdly open like that. Meanwhile, it’d been about seven hours since Greg shot up and he really needed another fix if he wanted to forget about his dead gay serial killer paramour today. Fucking neighbors bringing up fresh wounds.

Maybe Greg could just kill him.

But the kid.

…

“ …what’s up?” Greg finally asked, when the silence, and the voices in his head, got unbearable. 

“Dude… did you see that… alien thing?” Pete finally asked. Greg narrowed his eyes.

“In New York?”

“Yeah. …Trick was there. He’s, um, he’s fine.”

“Oh. Oh, that’s good.” That actually was good – much as Pete irked Greg, he would be damn near insufferable if he’d lost anyone in his life, especially someone as important to him as Patrick Stump was. His moping around after his band broke up kept Greg up at all hours, poorly-landing bass notes throbbing through his walls. Greg’s retaliation was banging pots and pans together, which didn’t work at all. “He talked to you?”

“Yeah, he did.” Pete paused before crossing his arms. “…what’d’you think of this whole Avengers thing?”

“Why, is Pat thinking of joining up?” Greg joked. It came out a little harsher than he intended, if Pete’s rapidly-paling face was any indication. “…sorry, it has not been a good… year.”

“Man, it’s fine, I know how that goes.” Pete probably did, of all the rich people trapped in this block of suburbia. “…and no. I’m just hearing some weird things. Like, the idea of people with powers? They were doing a thing on that on NPR this morning –” 

The idea of Pete Wentz listening to NPR was surreal at best, but Greg felt his stomach drop. People with powers. That would be him. And they were talking about people like him. On public radio. And now there would be a moral panic – and if they looked into those murders that were unsolvable – and if they figured out how - Shit. Greg closed the lid of his trash can and stepped closer to Pete as he rambled, none of the words penetrating Greg’s brain, instead wrapping his arms around his slim frame. His baggy sweater fell haphazardly around his collarbone as the gears in his warped brain started churning and turning. 

“Pete, you don’t care about that. Seriously.” Greg phrased it as nonchalantly and dismissively as possible, so that it didn’t sound like the command it really was. “I mean, people with powers? Seriously? Tony Stark made that suit. Captain America is some weird science experiment, too… and the Hulk, same difference.”

Pete nodded, the magic clearly weaving through his brain. Why was he even outside? Just taking a walk? Greg had to stop being so paranoid.

“…well, what about Thor?” Pete wondered. “…you think there’s more Norse gods?”

Greg raised an eyebrow. “…well, um, duh.”

“…there are?”

“Yeah Pete, the guy who attacked New York? Loki? He’s one.”

Pete’s eyes went wide as he nodded his head. Holy God, how did anyone put up with this idiot? 

“Ah, well, you know. Just thought that whole thing was interesting, but I guess people are just freaking out for no reason,” Pete said with a noncommittal shrug, heading back into his house. With a final turn back to Greg, he snorted. “People with mutant powers. So fucking ridiculous.”

“Yeah, ridiculous,” Greg responded as Pete reentered his house. Glaring at the door for a few seconds, Greg stalked back into his own residence. He couldn’t do that for everyone. Not by a long shot. His powers didn’t work on big crowds – they only worked one-on-one. Eventually, he’d be found out, once paranoia and hysteria moved sufficiently along. There would be tests, and people would know.

If Jim was alive, Jim would be able to help. He’d know exactly what to do to help this blow over. _Dear Jim, fix it for me to not be revealed. I need to keep myself under wraps until I can express myself in the ways you encouraged me to._

_Dear Jim, just fucking be here._

[…break…]

_Time: November 15, 2012._

Patrick Stump procured a suitcase.

_Time: November 16, 2012._

Pete Wentz needed to know what was in the suitcase.

_Time: November 28, 2012._

Patrick was really focused on getting Joe Trohman back into Fall Out Boy, so no, he was not going to talk about the suitcase. It was too important, he impressed upon Pete, and until he knew for sure that the whole gang would be back together, none of the whole gang would know about it.

_Time: November 30, 2012._

Pete tried to steal the suitcase. Patrick promptly took to locking the suitcase in a safe in the back of his apartment in Wilmette, Illinois.

_Time: December 5, 2013._

Much to Patrick’s delight, the entire band had been reassembled. Considering all the bad vibes Fall Out Boy managed to accumulate during their last touring run, the way Andy Hurley and Joe felt increasingly isolated from Patrick and Pete, Pete’s marriage falling apart before all their eyes, the ADD problems, the burnout… it was nice to just see everyone again.

They’d all assembled, from their various corners of the US, at Pete’s house in Los Angeles, sitting around, shooting the shit, like old times. Patrick didn’t think it seemed like that long ago, but then recalled – he’d been seventeen when this whole damn thing started. He really couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe he was meant to be tangled up with this group the rest of his days. 

Pete wouldn’t shut up, but that was pretty normal – he was effervescent, chatting with Joe Trohman, who, with his vaguely sleepy stare, managed to somehow keep track of it all. Andy was simply laying back in a chair, watching everything unfold, occasionally taking a glance at Patrick. 

The suitcase was stashed underneath a coffee table. They’d get to it eventually.

[…break…]

**TRACK BY TRACK - A Review of Greger Nordegren's 'Cyanide Lipstick And The Corrupt Mannequin'**  
 _Christine Everhart, The Daily Bugle - December 26th, 2012_

Shockingly, the press release about Greger Nordegren's latest pretentious exercise in insanity was right, and I got to listen to the dark twisted gothic noir known as _Cyanide Lipstick and the Corrupt Mannequin_ over my Christmas vacation. It is certainly not an easy listening album by any means. Of all of Nordegren's albums, this one is probably the densest, with overwhelming bombast contrasted by the most trying of threadbare tracks, the only uniting factor through most of the songs being Nordegren's crackling, crazed sliding voice, which is in good form here. My overall impression - this album is incredibly hard to sit through, but ultimately rewarding, and will likely win Nordegren a truckload of Grammys, again.

As is tradition in Daily Bugle music reviews, we'll be going track by track, through all thirteen of the songs on the standard edition of _Cyanide Lipstick..._. (The deluxe edition only has two additional tracks ("The Lynchpin", which is pretty catchy but vapid; "And You Owe Me The Pretty Girls", which should've been on the album proper instead of "The Slow Burning Madness"), but has multiple demos of the main album tracks, which are interesting but really only for the hardcore teenage girl market fans.)

 _Track One - A Little Bit About Me_  
Starting off the album is a three-minute exercise in screaming and genuinely terrifying strings overlaid with the continually looping notes of a player piano. In looking at the lyrics (which are all screamed in the same cracking falsetto), it seems to be about someone who's just witnessed an unspeakably brutal crime. Basically, this is a venting song, and screamo isn't really my thing.

 _Track Two - The Queen_  
The lead single from _Cyanide Lipstick..._ is already at number seven on the Billboard 100, and it's easy to see why. A lone church bell soon pushes into a piano-and-guitar duet about, presumably, the woman who suffered the crime in the first track, a contradictory and quixotic woman who, according to the lyrics, "cheated on her family and commiserated with her lovers/upheld her duty and abandoned her brothers". Once the chorus kicks in, the crash of instruments propels the song forward. There's something dark about the bass line, but this song is, admittedly, very catchy, and very much in the vein of Nordegren's biggest hit, the gothic-inspired "I Won't Miss You When I Die". The bridge contains a really cool viola solo, for those of you interested in that kind of thing.

 _Track Three - Our Final Problem_  
This should be the second single from the album - we can't really know what Nordegren will do - but a slow, languid, burning, sexual track about some sort of double-crossing, with some of Nordegren's best lyrics ("And on the streetcorner, the pavement, the air/And in the pollution, the sweat, laid bare/Everything about you in concrete and Westwood/Poisoned forever by the city's light") set against the sparse bass notes, occasionally punctuated by an erotic saxophone line? This is my favorite track of the album, and the one with the most raw emotion present in its lines, which Nordegren delivers as if wounded (especially in the coda: "If you didn't want me anymore, you could've said it/Didn't have to get involved with him/I won't regret this, won't regret it").

 _Track Four - The Slow Burning Madness_  
Another sparse track, the continuation of the album's disturbingly bleak narrative, is just a little too dark for its own good. The lyrics wallow in self-pity, the airy lightness of the string arrangement and the acoustic guitar inappropriately contrasting with the subject matter of the song (which can be boiled down to 'so everyone keeps dying, and I'll be next'). Unimpressed in the extreme... thankfully, it's really the only truly bad spot of the album.

 _Track Five - Some Words On The Troubled Times/Track Six - Do Your Best To Not F*** This Up_  
The first track name is a lie - it's an instrumental bridge piece, one that grows increasingly intense, relying on organ music in its last notes before propelling into another wonderfully atmospheric, bombastic number about the real dangers of the world out there. "Do Your Best..." borrows a pulsating electronic keyboard line from Patrick Stump's "Everybody Wants Somebody" and mirrors its message (both songs use the key phrase "don't get hurt" as a warning), but what makes "Do Your Best..." work as a trippy, dark dance/message track is what Nordegren builds around it - an overbearing organ part mixing with dubstep-influenced electronica, and a deeply unsettling lyrical conceit (without getting into detail that can't be printed, there's an entire verse about erotic cannibalism, as witnessed by a horrified narrator). It's amazing this song doesn't devolve into Lonely Island levels of self-parody, honestly.

 _Track Seven - Or Should I Say... Incubator_  
The track name references a rather dark magical girl anime called _Puella Magi Madoka Magica_ , according to a quick Google search, which is fitting for this track. Coming off of the extreme insanity of "Do Your Best...", "Or Should I Say..." is more subdued in its innate terror, reminiscent of bluesgrass numbers of old with little more than plucking guitars and a whining fiddle. The real strength of this number is Nordegren's falsetto and the song itself, which is hauntingly beautiful in all respects. The song also has the best lyric of the album, and the one that encapsulates it best: "And what we do, the pain we cause/Who's ever going to judge us anyways?"

 _Track Eight - Dance._  
It's a dance song. It's weirdly vapid, too, considering how deep and probing everything else on this album is... until the last verse, where Nordegren unravels the facade of happiness inherent in it without ever sounding anything less than cheerful. It's freaky, but then again, this album is generally not happy. Three out of "Dance."'s four minutes are a nice breather, all things considered.

 _Track Nine - She Wrote Me A Love Song_  
The pain of losing a love is a common theme for Nordegren (see: _The Tidal Roll_ 's "Pretend For Five Seconds" and "The Coffeeshop"; _Everything You Ever Said_ 's beginning track "I Owe You Something" and its counterpart/last track "I Owe You Nothing"), and as far as that goes, "She Wrote Me A Love Song" is nowhere near as powerful as the bookend songs in _Everything You Ever Said_. However, it's a serviceable ballad, about misunderstanding the depth of someone's affection until too late ("It's bittersweet, you being gone/Feelings I thought would be meaningless/They've stuck around far too long/As does the distress"). Probably the most radio-friendly track here, though not the most well-done and slightly cliched.

 _Track Ten - So What'll It Be, Boys?_  
The shattered, piercing female scream at the beginning of this song is probably the easiest bit of it to listen to. That's saying a lot. This track's raw, insistent pressure, throbbing bass and electronic overlays, and ominous horns create an intense feeling of claustrophobia within the song. The song's narrative is another absolutely crazy one - someone having a massive drug freak-out in a bathroom is what me and the editors assumed it was about, but it doesn't explain the line about the sapphire-laced hermaphrodite, or the constant mentioning of blood on the walls - and I was glad to be done listening to it. A very good song, but it's by no means catchy.

 _Track Eleven - Might Be Time To Start Looking Up_  
After being crushed by the intense darkness of the rest of the album, which has created a rather dreary cityscape, Nordegren, despite the nice title, doesn't show any signs of relenting, but this song, unlike most of the others, takes a rather desperately personal look at himself. Using only a piano, Nordegren eviscerates himself, all in the name of a lover who is, by the sounds of it, would do anything to kill him for what he did ("I deserve your consternation/And your condemnation/And the phone calls to the police/And the FBI/And the private eye/And the fires you lit in my yard/And every other sin you could inflict" - Christ, what the hell did he do?). 

_Track Twelve - Culpability_  
An orchestral composition, made up of bitterly waning strings, flutes, and bassoons, evolving naturally from the last track and building up to the last track.

 _Track Thirteen - Somebody That I Used to Know_  
Yep, it's a cover of the Gotye track. Yep, Nordegren sings both parts, which gives the unsettling effect of him screaming at himself to do something about every problem outlined in the rest of the album. In Nordegren's hands, the song about a hypocritical lover (and, to a lesser extent, the world's most annoying xylophone trill) becomes a breakup note to an entire city in despair, marked with inner turmoil and the idea that maybe Nordegren is part of the decay. It's certainly a fascinating cover for that reason alone, but divorced from the album, probably doesn't have that effect.

 **Overall Rating:** B+  
 **Standout Track:** Our Final Problem  
 **Availability:** Vinyl (limited pressing), CD, iTunes

[…break…]

_Time: December 30, 2012._

Greg remembered the exact moment everything turned from black-and-white back to color for the rest of his life. He could pinpoint exactly what he was doing when his life became livable once more – he was backstage, in New York, about to play “The Queen” for Jimmy Fallon’s late-night audience. Fallon was affable and fun to be around, Greg actually felt kind of okay about life, he was a week off of cocaine (at the request of his label), and no one managed to figure out which song on his album was actually about a break-up…

His phone buzzed just as he finished buttoning a black jacket over his bright red v-neck. Not thinking much of it, Greg pulled his phone out of his pocket, thumbing open the message.

And promptly almost died.

text: Jim <3  
(07911)  
ready to have some fun again, greg?

[...end part one...]


End file.
